following which the company quickly patched the loophole within a couple
of days.
There is an upside of being able to broadcast to phones. Emergency
management agencies would be able to reach out and warn populations
more easily than ever before — an important consideration in today’s post-
9/11 environment, something that would be useful not only for national
alerts but for local ones such as Amber Alerts for Missing Children.
The industry is very aware of the potential for SPIT and a number of
companies are developing solutions to address it, it will be interesting to
see how the issue is addressed by companies and regulatory bodies like
the FCC.
VoIP for 911 & 411 Services
One of the challenges with VoIP is how it handles calls to 911 and 411
services, in fact only a few Service Providers presently support these.
VoIP for 911
While the use of 411 may be nothing more than a minor inconvenience to
many people, 911 can be a matter of life and death.
Of those Providers that do provide 911 support, there are a number of
known challenges simply because of how VoIP works. In VoIP, your
number is tied to the specific Telephone Adapter or VoIP-designed phone
that drives your service.
First of all you must tell your Provider the physical location of your line for
911 dialing to function. Even then your call does not go the regular 911
operator but to a call handling center (the closest one to your physical
location on file), and while you may get priority on your call being
answered, it’s not the same as a regular 911 call.
Next, when you reach the call center you not only have to give them the
nature of your emergency, but also your physical address because they do
not have that information on file and cannot tell it from your call.
Because VoIP is a portable service (say you take your VoIP Adapter on a
trip from Los Angeles to New York), then your emergency call is still routed
to your local physical address (the Los Angeles Call Center) which can
cause a delay in getting emergency services to you.

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